Why Many Progressive Policy Trends Are Backward

A new year and more clamoring to alter our lives for good. Top ten ways to lose weight, find a soulmate, achieve Nirvana—everyone has an idea of how we should live and how we can accomplish a full and balanced human experience. Many regimes are worth trying, yet some are as deceptively unproductive as rehashed recommendations in women’s magazines. The first that comes to mind is the proliferating trend of “going green.”

The first recycling bins that hit the block in my childhood were little yellow plastic boxes. After some years, they began to overflow and people got two bins. Now we have a full-sized rolling county-issued garbage can. This is indeed progress.

What is not progress, however, is badgering people into reverting to practices that modern life has made obsolete. No, of course walking will never go out of style, but what is the practicality of taking a bicycle to a grocery store and strapping two heavily-weighted reusable bags to the handle bars? They’re heavily weighted because the stores have a bounty of supplies on their shelves and we weren’t going to bring ten reusable bags. Why did we bring reusable bags? Because we live in Washington, D.C. and are charged five cents for the convenience of utilizing the store’s already-manufactured plastic bags.

This is a nightmare scenario. Just as bad is the one where we are told to grow vegetables on our windowsills. Subsistence farming is not a condition of life in America and there is no need to reintroduce it. Same with the trend of vegetarianism, which is touted as a way to reduce the carbon footprint of our livestock industry. Let’s go back to the grocery store on our bicycles. The meat coolers are full. There aren’t fewer steaks packaged because it is fashionable to forgo protein. I would like to see a study about the carbon footprint of growing soy, turning it into tofu, packaging it, and shipping it to a Farmer’s Market. Everything has a cost, whether to the environment or to the consumer.

It’s a never-ending list of inconveniences that the green movement either peer pressures us into accepting into our lives or legislates through an executive branch agency. Yet it’s not the only kind of progressive life coaching that pushes us back into a bygone era.

“The rich need to pay their fair share” is a mantra these days. Yet the words fair and share are not straightforward. The vilified robber barons of late 19th and early 20th Century were not burdened by a federal income tax. Extraordinary circumstances, but it yielded extraordinary results. Arts and education benefited greatly from the philanthropy of these individuals. We continue to enjoy the legacy of those families who have established universities and museums, restored cities, and, not to be overlooked, created products and services that continue to improve our lives.

While we can’t go back to a taxless society, if we are indeed going to send us back an age as some progressives see fit, then we can question the need to attack top earners. These are the entrepreneurs and investors who continue to create wealth that enables our consumer culture. Christmas is a season of giving, but it’s also a season of buying. The items this go-round would have stunned even a person living just a few years ago. I can’t imagine what people before the now humiliated incandescent lightbulb would have thought.

Progressives have their hand in education too. Before the 1950s, the federal government did not play a large role in the school system of the United States. In December, Obama met with university authorities to outline his ideas for controlling an education that is neither compulsory nor economically reasonable for everyone. His administration proposes to dole out federal grants based on student achievement. This might be possible with Kindergarteners who either learn the alphabet or don’t, but how does the Secretary of Education propose to determine if the person taking notes and asking questions in The Psychology of Post-Revolutionary French Adolescents is a higher-achiever than the person sitting at the back of the lecture hall in Macroeconomics?

Obama and his colleagues also believe they can insist on eliminating college drop-outs when some college drop-outs have turned out to be the greatest Americans. Another Obama idea—performance-based scholarships. Now, that’s really going back an era, back when some students performed better than others because they weren’t mandated to all achieve together.

Encouraging a debt-inducing and occasionally superfluous higher education is not progress. It’s more reminiscent of an Oxford degree a century ago when high-born gentlemen wore gowns and discussed theology. What’s needed is an employable education, which many students in America are already realizing they need to get. Most likely this is not going to come with a $50,000/year price tag.